This makes exit 1 produce a successful exit (with status SS$_NORMAL), instead of emulating UNIX exit(), which considers exit 1 to indicate an error. As with the CRTL's exit() function, exit 0 is also mapped to an exit status of SS$_NORMAL, and any other argument to exit() is used directly as Perl's exit status.

This suppresses printing of VMS status messages to SYS$OUTPUT and SYS$ERROR if Perl terminates with an error status. and allows programs that are expecting "unix-style" Perl to avoid having to parse VMS error messages. It does not suppress any messages from Perl itself, just the messages generated by DCL after Perl exits. The DCL symbol $STATUS will still have the termination status, but with a high-order bit set:

The 'hushed' flag has a global scope during compilation: the exit() or die() commands that are compiled after 'vmsish hushed' will be hushed when they are executed. Doing a "no vmsish 'hushed'" turns off the hushed flag.

The status of the hushed flag also affects output of VMS error messages from compilation errors. Again, you still get the Perl error message (and the code in $STATUS)

You can also control the 'hushed' flag at run-time, using the built-in routine vmsish::hushed(). Without argument, it returns the hushed status. Since vmsish::hushed is built-in, you do not need to "use vmsish" to call it.